For many students, the phrase “distance learning” calls to mind a solitary student crouching in some cramped corner of the house, staring listlessly at a computer screen. The screen is meant to be an opening or portal into the world formerly known as high school. But the portal opens both ways—it is a means of observing and thinking about the internal workings of our institution. Suddenly, students learning from a distance have an unsettling view of what passes for learning at IHS. The prospect is alarming.
The pandemic has stripped school down to lessons, assignments, homework. This concentrated kind of schooling need not be a bad thing, so long as the lessons themselves are good and contribute to a genuine education. Carefully designed, a shorter, more intensive school day focused on edifying exchanges between students and teachers, students and their books, students and other students, students and their own thoughts, might have led to long revitalizing afternoons in which unfettered students freely commit to our own athletic, musical, vocational, or artistic pursuits. But administrators in the Ithaca City School District (ICSD) have not met the challenge of providing an online (or in-person) education that is energizing, varied, and aimed directly at the goal of preparing students for fulfilling future employment. Instead, they seem convinced—and are trying to convince us—that the work we do in school is ultimately not a challenge worth meeting but a hardship and a burden. Consequently, all the district’s efforts are aimed at lightening the load.
Consider the environment in which online classes are now conducted. Cameras are not required. Class participation is not required. Late assignments are not penalized. Failing grades are masked by “safety net” measures. Books have been replaced with “manageable” short articles; thoughtful analysis has been replaced with students’ immediate, emotional reactions and impressions; long-term research and writing projects have been replaced with extemporaneous discussion. Teachers have been obliged to carry out Board of Education policies.
Cameras are not required.
At IHS teachers are not allowed to require that cameras are turned on for class. If self-conscious teenagers are given the option to hide our faces and not risk participating, we will likely seize the opportunity (especially if everyone else has). In addition, many students report technical trouble connecting to online classes that prevent them from having their camera on. As a result, students learning from home now suffer through an online environment where only one or two living faces can be seen among a sea of frozen profiles. Though it is entirely possible to participate without turning on cameras, many students don’t answer direct questions, don’t write in the chat, don’t give any indication they are still present. Even when breakout rooms are used to give students a better chance to engage with one another, students who are there and want to talk to their classmates face the wearying task of speaking into the void and waiting for responses that never come. Instead of collaborating in social learning and making new friends, they learn to endure a humiliating silence.
Class participation is not required.
While it is only to be expected that teachers are more flexible with students during this stressful time, it is startling that teachers no longer enforce or even encourage class participation, either by making participation an expected part of class or by making a regular habit of calling on students. Because class participation is all about norm setting—creating the expectation that class conversation is ongoing and questions might be asked at any time—students now do not expect to be called on if they remain off camera. If they are unexpectedly called on, they often do not respond at all—presumably for the reason that they are not present. Expectations for student participation are now so low that just logging onto Google Meets warrants thank yous from teachers.
Late assignments are not penalized.
Teachers have been explicitly told by the administration to simplify and slow down the curriculum. As a result, students have seen a reduction of content, a diminishment in the intensity, variety, frequency, and complexity of assignments, and the frequent postponement of due dates. Teachers too often give due dates which are then ignored, and assignments turned in late receive little or no penalty. This policy offers a stark contrast to the pre-pandemic era, when late work was a sure way for students’ grades to plunge. Students who have labored to turn in their assignments on time find themselves dragged through the same assignment for further dreary class sessions. Moreover, telling students who are having trouble turning in assignments that “it doesn’t matter when you turn them in, so long as they are in by the end of the marking period” is unlikely to offer real help. The problems of struggling students only mount and their days feel even more unstructured and lonely.
Failing grades and incomplete assignments are masked by “safety net” measures.
Despite lenient grading and a reduced curriculum, more IHS students are failing than ever before. The alarming number of students who are not doing well in classes has led the IHS Administration to implement “safety net” measures. Currently, students who receive a 65 and below in any class will not fail the class but receive a “COVID designation.” At some point the student will be contacted by a school counselor, dean or associate principal. The student may then be allowed to “engage in online credit recovery options” before the end of the school year, or, perhaps, to take advantage of “Summer Credit Recovery.” Which raises the questions: Who will be giving these credit recovery courses? Will already overworked and overwhelmed teachers be asked to dedicate more time to the same students who would not or could not complete their classes? At best, a student will be asked to complete work without the advantage of a trusted teacher to help identify the problems that were tripping the student up in the first place. At worst, unchallenging online “fulfillment options” risk moving students through essential requirements without receiving any true educational benefit.
Books have been replaced with “manageable” short articles; thoughtful analysis has been replaced with students’ immediate, emotional reactions and impressions; long-term research and writing projects have been replaced with extemporaneous discussion.
Troublingly, school is no longer helping us to communicate clearly and effectively, or to address a live audience coherently, or read books that are new to us, or talk to people we don’t know well. Contrary to the way we’ve typically imagined schoolwork, we are now encouraged to produce responses that resemble Instagram or Twitter posts and send in GIFs or memes that symbolize our feelings for the day. Presumably, teachers champion immediate and short-form responses because they assume that making school work analogous to social media posts will allow students to be more comfortable and take added pleasure in the work. But in fact these practices get rid of the expectation that students communicate in careful, original, informed ways. This disorienting shift from close reading and written analysis to impromptu discussion (“hot takes” or “quick writes” or “do nows”) seems designed to make our manner of communicating more colloquial, more personal, more literal, less professional. Besides, doesn’t the most enduring, economical, least technology-dependent way to learn from home involve reading really good books? All students, those who already love books as well as those who have not yet come to delight in the way a good book can expand the imaginative reality of human beings, need more practice reading and thinking critically about what they’ve read. (Reading well, Thoreau says, “requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole of life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”) But the books in our curriculum, like the long-term, carefully-researched assignments, are disappearing.
Teachers are obliged to carry out ICSD Board of Education policies that hamper teachers’ own expertise, experience, and efficacy in the classroom.
Teachers were already being constrained over the past few years by slowed and homogenized curriculums. Now they are distressed by sudden changes to grading protocol and diminished dialogue. Enduring learning requires intellectual challenge, engagement, creativity and focused effort for teachers as well as students. Experienced teachers who are forced to abandon their own best teaching practices are left unable to help students, especially students in crisis.
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These radical changes to school policy are supposed to help students and further promote our “Culture of Love.” A recent IHS memorandum explains the changes to grading protocol this way:
We continue to have an emergency educational crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic that began during the spring of 2020. This crisis has caused numerous academic and technological challenges for both students and caregivers. It has changed much of how we teach and learn. We must change how we grade as well.
Our goal is to create a safety net and to support our students.
Ithaca High School has removed all the usual measures that give public education a reliable structure and make the fair assessment of students possible. IHS no longer supports mandatory attendance, predictable grading rubrics, timely feedback from teachers, or enforcement of informal rules that govern behavior in groups and that are designed to promote fairness and cooperation. This infantilizes students and robs us of our agency. We are being treated in a way that is apparently kind but that eliminates accountability. Instead of being “supported,” we are being patronized.
For one thing, students who adopt the “support” on offer are not going to equip themselves with a reliable skill-set or useful habits. What will happen when IHS students pursue higher learning or have to compete for careers with real deadlines? Your boss at Ithaca Bike Rental, The Yarn Emporium, or The Overpriced Children’s Apparel Store is unlikely to tolerate late or missing work. Your mentors in medical school are not likely to say: “We would really like you to memorize correctly these medical terms; of course, this is only a suggestion. If you do not learn them, we will not test you, and you will not be penalized. When you start seeing patients who rely on you, we will just have to hope for the best.” Your mother is not likely to say: “I’d really like you to be home by 9:30 on a school night, but of course this is only a suggestion I have no way of enforcing.”
Consider, too, the devilish piece of illogic we’ve willingly accepted. According to the IHS Administration and the ICSD Board of Education, we have an “emergency educational crisis” as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because of this crisis designation, all the usual norms and regulations that create successful learning environments, online or otherwise, have been dispensed with. ICSD is apparently unable to form a connection between the number of students who are struggling, failing, or losing interest in school and the abandonment of the usual standards of acceptable student conduct and the best practices in the classroom.
This contorted logic should remind us of ICSD’s reopening plans—plans which were bound for trouble from the very beginning. Presentations by the ICSD administration detailing reopening plans were confusing and frustrating. Bafflingly, a survey was sent out to families a mere five days before plans were to be submitted to the Governor—making it impossible to actually include student and parent suggestions and opinions in reopening plans. According to a teacher at the February 9 Board of Education Meeting, a committee consisting of ICSD teachers dedicated to formulating a reopening plan met repeatedly over the summer. After countless hours of hard work, they had created a plan that would put students into cohorts to minimize quarantine and exposure. A day before the plan was due, Superintendent Luvelle Brown expressed his dislike of the teachers’ reopening plan and instructed them to present his decisions. Teachers expressed frustration over not being heard and questioned the purpose of the teacher committees if their feedback was going to be ignored.
The levelling down of academic content is not unique to the pandemic era. Over the past few years, ICSD has been determined to simplify the curriculum and remove advanced learning options. In 2019, the accelerated math program at the middle school level was cancelled. This year, tenth grade English Humanities has been removed from the IHS Program of Studies. Rising tenth graders now only have the choice of Regents or Honors English 10. Those seeking a more academically challenging or classic literature-based English course will not be able to take one until their junior year. Our school district seems bent on continuing its mission to deprive students of academic challenges, limit the range of content we encounter, and reduce school to a joyless, empty enterprise.
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But there is a new twist in the promotion of ICSD’s misguided policies. Instead of reforming the system, school administrators are covering up their shortcomings by selling us a lie. The district is now turning students into converts who embrace and promote the very policies that will eventually leave us stranded and foundering. Should we feel grateful for changes that will leave us unserved in the end? The Board of Education wants us to believe that we need the changes being made, that we couldn’t succeed without flattening and levelling the curriculum, loosening online etiquette, and reducing participation and accountability. If the administrators are willing to implement practices that do not genuinely promote learning, they are selling out. It is up to us not to buy in.
Students, there are some things we can do today to improve the culture of online learning. There is no reason we need to accept the second-rate models we’ve been offered. We must stop embracing the ICSD-pushed ideology that learning is a burden. It’s a gift. We can choose to participate in class instead of sitting silently hunched in a corner. We can pluck up some courage and show our faces, or even just volunteer to answer a few questions.
Let’s acknowledge that compelling questions posed by alert teachers can improve class participation and help students clarify their thoughts. Students pay better attention when they know they might be called on. Instead of seeing “cold-calling” as a punishment or shaming mechanism for distracted students, dynamic teachers use questions to deepen class discussion, make class activities lively and fun, and bring the best out of every student. When used correctly, cold-calling can create a classroom environment of trust and understanding, where mistakes are not only expected but encouraged.
We might consider big reforms that test new modes of learning such as an experiment designed to give students more time during class to complete work with a measure of privacy and dignity. In exchange, students agree to keep cameras on for half the class. Ask for more time to read, think, and respond during the school day. If we could go to school every day and talk with our peers and teachers before the pandemic, we can certainly do so now.
This last year and a half has proved that decisions made by those in power are not always the right decisions. We must wake up to the fact we can take care of ourselves. Let’s use our own agency to do what is good for us, not what feels good right now.